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User blog:Crazychick08/Not Bedtime Stories
Occasionally, when Yondu was in the mood, he would tell stories. When the crew was celebrating or lounging around in a bar or a pleasure planet’s seedy underworld, waiting for their next job to take off, he’d sometimes talk about old jobs he’d been on. Some with old crew, some with crew that was still here, but mostly it was about the early days of the Ravagers. There were a million stories that were easy to tell. How Martinex had flown through the Black Hole Causeway to avoid being gunned down by enemy fighters. There was the time Aleta had cut a mark to pieces so thin they’d been like paper when she was done. If nothing else, he could always talk about their time in the Ystroi wars, where hundreds of noble houses vied for supremacy on the planet and had been more than happy to offer or counteroffer large ass sums for the Ravagers to work. How those wars made them wealthy enough to get a proper ship instead of a cruiser, and hire the men to man it, over the course of three years and he could take five years to explain all that had happened and the fallout. There were smaller scale stories too. Things that weren’t always so life or death. Like the time Charlie-27 had stumbled through the fields of Raxnor, fleeing Ragnatic bees. The broads Yondu had met. Krugarr’s luck at gambling that was so good Knowhere swore for years that he cheated without proof. He had cheated, of course, magic like, but they’d never been able to prove it. They were fun stories and they were easy to tell. It got his men laughing and drinking and kept the party going. Nobody needed to know the deeper parts of those stories. Nobody cared how Mainframe taught him what it meant to be a person almost as much as Stakar did or how Krugarr had shown him just how much there was to the universe, more than any map could ever dream of teaching. How Charlie had had to teach him how to fly and shoot and fix things because the closest Yondu had gotten to anything like that as a slave had been a dull knife to kill another slave with. Or how Martinex had helped him design his Yaka arrow and a cybernetic fin since the Kree had cut his own off. How Aleta had given him a gun and let him kill the last Kree slaver in the joint the day he’d been freed. Certainly nobody gave a damn how it felt when he realized he didn’t have to do anything they said. How he’d always told them ‘No’ or ‘Do it yourself’ wasn’t just some funny stage he’d gone through, how much it had mattered at the time he seize his freedom and that included telling Aleta and Stakar, his rescuers, to shove off and leave him alone when it wasn’t important and there was nothing in it for him. How his collection started because he’d seen something cute and bought it on a whim because for the first time he had money. More than enough to eat and dress and maintain his jobs on the cruiser, and so he’d picked the thing up because he could. Those weren’t victorious stories. They were sentiment. And sentiment had no place in the Ravagers. No, it was better to stick to the fun stuff. Stuff his men wanted to hear. Stuff they could drink to, and put a glimmer of excitement in the boy’s eye, and make it sound like it had all been more than just a bunch of dumb kids striking it rich. They didn’t care about the deeper stories and they weren’t stories Yondu wanted to tell anyways. There were other stories too, far darker ones. The others didn’t know and they didn’t need to know, and Yondu wouldn’t tell them for a very different reason. He didn’t even want to think about those times and he wouldn’t know how to begin to explain them if he’d tried. Like the sound of Aleta’s screaming when her children had disintegrated in front of her. Stakar had been too compassionate to kill Aleta’s father the first time, like Yondu had told him to, and so their children paid for it with their lives. Aleta had screamed and raked her face and had tried to kill Stakar where he stood, with Charlie and Martinex struggling to hold her back. How he and Stakar had fought, because Stakar bemoaned that he'd caused the deaths of his own children, said that if he’d kept the devices the kids were hooked up to on, even if they were brainwashed, they may still be alive. Yondu had angrily retorted that if he’d listened to Yondu and shot his father in law in the head, his children would definitely still be alive. That night had been long and vicious and it was a miracle the crew didn’t split right there. Or the way he and Martinex finally came to blows because Martinex thought Yondu was an idiot who couldn’t tell when he was being played for a sucker when he sought out dangerous experiment parts.. He may not have understood the bastard’s science, but he could tell when someone thought he was better than he was. A sharp whistle would have ended that, but it never could have felt so good as a punch in the face. He didn’t talk about how Krugarr had gone around messing with arts he shouldn’t have and nearly dragged them all into some kind of hell. How the others had had to beat their friend nearly to death to get him unconscious enough to stop. Nobody needed to know that a lot of the time he’d slip away with Mainframe. She was bubbly, not something he tolerated well, but she was also a decent listener. They were meant to be friends (and, when she could find a body to plug into, friends with AMAZING benefits). And then she’d used him. She’d found something she wanted, some upgrade or whatever, and she’d put him in the line of Kree fugitive slave catchers to get it. And when he’d nearly punted her stupid head through the airlock, she fucking shot him. Between his temper and pride and her refusal to be wrong and ability to shut down her emotion patch, that so called friendship had fallen into hell. Nobody needed to know Charlie had just been a cocky bastard, and he and Martinex and Krugarr fed each other’s more reckless plans and pushed each other further until the others had intervened to keep the three from causing trouble. Really though, none of that had been the worst. The worst had been just how unbearable it was for any of them to be around each other. The little digs, the snubs, sniping at each other. All the little irritations were pinpricks and they just kept sticking each other until they’d screamed. And fought. And just didn’t want to be near each other anymore. Aleta had been the first one who was smart enough to walk away. She told them all one night that she had enough to buy another ship. She said she’d take whoever volunteered to come with her and hire whoever else she needed, but she was leaving one way or another. The idea of giving someone their own ship and splitting into two factions, under some loyal crew person, had been one they’d bandied about for a while, and so Stakar had approved his wife leaving. As if he could have stopped her. Nobody understood that. Yondu supposed they couldn’t possibly. He certainly didn’t have any crew from way back then on his ship, and he would be surprised if any of the others did. Letting someone form their own faction hadn’t been a reward for good service and anybody who had been there at the time had probably seen through that explanation in an instant for the bullshit lie it was. Aleta wasn’t being rewarded for being such a great offence captain (though she was). She fucking LEFT. She left and she took who she wanted with her. And that was how the original Ravager crew died. After that, more and more split off. Yondu was pretty sure the only two still together were Stakar and Martinex, as Martinex got promoted to First Mate. It had been easier after that. Once they didn’t have to see each other unless they wanted to, it got easier to see each other when they did. At least they didn’t want to kill each other. Things were getting better. Until they found out about the kid. It had been a mission where he’d teamed with Aleta’s fleet to split the profit and Martinex had tagged along, since he was stuck passing messages between Aleta and Stakar like they were goddamn 8 year olds. Peter was supposed to be hiding in the cargo hold, but someone had attacked the ship and he’d had to move. Yondu had been a lot late getting back, thanks to the kid slowing him down, and Martinex had noticed. He’d asked about the boy and Yondu’s only answer was his momma was dead, so they’d make a Ravager of him. Martinex skulked off, muttering apologies, said he didn’t know Yondu’s son was with him. Aleta’d remarked, suspiciously, that she didn’t even know Yondu had a son. A mission report to Stakar later and it all came crashing down. They found out about everything and they didn’t want to hear what happened. How he didn’t know what happened until it was too late and that was WHY he kept the kid. They had exiled him and his crew and that was the end of it. So he told them they could go to hell and stick it wherever they wanted. He was his own Ravager and he didn’t need any of them to approve of that. Yeah. Yondu had a lot of stories alright. Some of them were fun, and some of them he’d never tell if his life were on the line. He’d definitely have been proud to make more with his old crew if he’d had the chance, though. Category:Blog posts